Registration thoughts, parent/family Orientation, and housing
I am out of the office today, so this is a blend of pre-posted content and news from today.
Registration for fall classes is coming up next week for our ’25s and transfer students. New students received an email on July 1 about class registration. That email has a ton of good info in it. I’ll add just a few thoughts from my perch as an academic adviser.
The Curriculum Requirements page of the New Students website gives a broad overview of what students are required to take. Incoming students must take their FYS (First Year Seminar) and WRI 111 (writing class) their first year, unless exempted via AP/IB scores. You would not want to take both in the same semester, so plan for one in the fall, the other in the spring. Students are encouraged to take HES 100 their first year according to the Curriculum Requirements page.
Beyond those courses, if I were advising a student, I would encourage them to continue their foreign language requirement (so it’s still fresh in their mind). And then choose other classes from the list of Divisional Requirements in subjects they enjoy and are good at – OR – take any pre-requisite or foundational classes for a particular path like business, pre-health, engineering, etc.; see details here.
I will also share a bit of strategy advice from my own time at Wake. As I looked at the Course Completion checklist as an incoming first-year, I used the “eat your broccoli first” strategy and tried to load up my fall coursework with Divisional requirements I did NOT like, just to get them out of the way. I do not recommend this option.
What I did not know then – but know now – is that college level work is harder than high school work. And I would have been much better served working extra hard on subjects I enjoyed, vs. struggling to keep up in subjects I did not. So for me, dipping my toe into the college pool gently would have been a better strategy. At least I would have been in familiar territory. That is just my perspective, of course, and your ’25s are free to take or leave that as they see fit.
Registration can feel like an inherently stressful process because it is something our incoming students haven’t done before, but pretty much any course they register for will advance them toward their degree. Students need 120 credit hours to graduate, and between Basic and Divisional requirements and major requirements, there is still room left over for electives (i.e., any class you want to take, in any subject). Students may need to be open to taking a course earlier in the morning than they might have wanted, or to take a class with a different faculty member than they might have researched, so a flexible approach is helpful too.
There was also a message today to our ’25s about the fact that the College Board reports that scores will be sent to universities later than originally planned, which means your Deacs might not have their AP Test scores back before they start to register for classes. The message indicated that to help make up for this, incoming students will have additional time to make schedule adjustments once their scores are received; this will be a help. Your Deacs can also look at the AP Placement Policy and make some informed decisions about classes they could register for while they wait on their scores.
Bottom line is that while the issue of late scores is out of our control, we know it is an issue and have added additional flexibility via add/drop time to allow our students to make adjustments.
In housing news, for any of the juniors and seniors who might be considering Wake’s offer to move from campus to the Crowne properties or Deacon Station, we thought it would be helpful to outline some of what students benefit from when they move to these University-sponsored properties (they received a message about this).
The first one is simply more space – both in terms of shared/common living space (kitchen, den, dining area), and in the actual bedrooms. The bedrooms in the Crowne properties, for example, are listed as being 12x 14, 13×13, 12x 15, etc.; whereas traditional Quad rooms are closer to the 10’8”x12, or 8’8” by 13’. And Deacon Station is two stories, so it really feels like a home.
Privacy – all of the bedrooms are singles in these properties, so no having to share a room with someone else, or have to be thoughtful about how late you stay up (disturbing a roommate). You get the benefit of living with friends and having separate bedrooms you can go to when you need privacy for studying or whatever. Also, there is one bathroom per occupant, so no sharing bathrooms! Some of the bathrooms are off the bedroom, others are in the hall, but you can each claim one for your own and use only “your” bathroom. This means you can control how clean it is, when you want the shower, etc.
If visuals matter to you, these properties feel very upscale – homey and grown up. They have nice kitchens and bathrooms with good appliances (you can peruse some of the complex photos for Crowne Oaks, Crowne Polo, Crowne Park, and Deacon Station). They are more like Deacon Place than Kitchin Hall. Apartment living also gets our older students more ready for Life After Wake Forest, as they will have more practice managing a household.
There are also amenities. There are shuttles to campus, so students don’t need a car. Some of these apartments have private patios, which would be great to use when you want to study outdoors when the weather is nice. Both the Crownes and Deacon Stations have pools and exercise rooms, and students can also benefit from common clubhouse space.
Connection to other Wake students – we anticipate a lot of camaraderie between students living in these properties, much in the same way that seniors who live in off-campus single-family homes on the borders of campus connect with each other as neighbors, socialize together, and so on.
Finally, a late edit to the prepost: a message went out today to ’25s and transfer students about Move-In and Orientation. I want to share this one excerpt specifically for parents and families:
Parent and Family Orientation: For travel planning purposes, we anticipate having parent and family programming on both Wednesday, August 18th, and Thursday, August 19th. You may attend whichever day you prefer, as the programs will cover the same material each day. Formal programming for families will end by Thursday evening, so families should plan to depart on Friday, as students will be involved in their own Orientation programming. In addition, we will release some brief videos later in July to help cover some key topics, such as the college transition, safety, campus involvement, and more. You will be able to view those at your leisure.